This

I can’t. It’s hard to express exactly. I just think this is so sad on so many levels: You can use If This Then That to search your Google Calendar for birthday dates, then automatically send messages to your friends via Facebook ‘on their special day’. How ‘special’.

That technology can facilitate it. That someone created it. That people would want it. That 53,000 people are using it and likely feeling good that they have outsourced their care and compassion for friends and family. That the oxymoronically loaded words “automatically wish your friends a Happy Birthday on Facebook” are even permitted by our brains to make sense.

It reduces the act of wishing someone a Happy Birthday to being even less important and sincere than the quick fire wishes that people post when prompted on the day by Facebook.

I don’t know. This kind of outsourcing of our attention has been getting at me for a while now, perhaps due partly to falling foul of it myself, and that despite that feeling, I’m still yet to take much action to remedy it.